Cans, stripes, luck (Carrara NV)

It was a lovely cloudy day on Sunday. I'm still delighted by stunning blue sky days here, but sometimes a brewing storm can be even more beautiful. It wasn't heavy enough to be raining down to ground level much, but the virga/walking clouds were trailing lightly over the hills, and the sunlight was dappling the land through huge crazy cloud patterns.

Raffle prize - a chunk of halite from California.
Approx 25 cm across. Yes, it's pink.

We started out by driving over the hill to Pahrump, where Simon had won two raffle prizes at last week's rock and gem show. (Our batting average lately is astounding, actually. Last time I entered a raffle was at the rock and gem club meeting a few weeks ago, where I also won two prizes, one of them the grand prize. Hey statistics, you just keep looking the other way, okay? Okay.) The prize pickup was handled in a particularly Nevadan way, by meeting up in a casino car park.

Rainbow onyx looks something like this when sawn into slabs.
Pink colours have been washed out by the light. 10 cm across

Then we thought we'd drive up to a site not far off highway 95, where beautiful rocks can be found. It's called rainbow onyx locally, but I've no idea whether it actually is onyx or not. Well, we couldn't manage the road. (We got out and Simon looked carefully at it - I must admit I was quickly distracted by the bright colour stones on and near the road.) Every Sunday drive like this gets us one step closer to buying a high clearance 4WD car instead of poor dear long-suffering Harry. What we could have done was park and hike. Instead we decided to drive a little further north to the ghost town of Carrara, near Beatty and not far south of Meiklejohn Peak.

They quarried white marble here about a hundred years ago. You can still see some ruined concrete foundations from the highway - currently sporting "blue lives mater" graffiti. (Spelling apparently doesn't 'mater'.) The Beatty to Las Vegas as well as the Tonopah railroads used to run along the middle of the valley, and the town was on the railroad rather than at the quarry in the hills.

The turnoff is paved, but it almost immediately becomes gravel/rock/dirt road. Just after passing the foundations, you can see traces of the old town to either side. Rusty cans are scattered broadcast on the desert floor; here and there are scraps of roofing iron. I'm not quite certain that this was the old town site, although the traces would make you think so. One book I saw gives an intriguing hint of 'the foundations further north' - 'a Philippines concrete factory' from the '30s. But nothing more is said. There are definitely both mines and roads into them, not far north. Another day.

rusty cans everywhere

road into Carrara Canyon

mines to the north

We headed up this road, which runs nearly straight up into the hills. (I'd love to know why there are little quirks in it.) It was only a mile or so in that we reached a stretch of loose, fist-sized rock that Harry wouldn't look at. This time we did lace up our boots and continue on foot. Almost straight away Simon found the first railroad spike. This old road must follow an old railway, as we found more bits of hardware strewn either side of the road - spikes, eyelets, other more mysterious scraps of ironmongery. Makes sense; if you're moving lumps of rock down a hill, surely you'd want to slide it on tracks, not roll it on roads. Workers go up, rocks go down.

small stripes - the bullseye piece is about 15 cm across

medium stripes - this piece also about 15 cm across

large stripes that you could walk right into if not for stupid property rules

Everything is striped here, on almost any scale you care to look at - tiny pebbles and chips of rock, boulders, channels of the wash, vegetation on the hills, through to the hills themselves. (Click through to the map and check out the stripy aerial view. So cool!)



It would be a gross exaggeration to call it a hike. Meander is a better word, as we stopped every couple of seconds to pick up rocks, look at the amazing local cacti, or turn back to admire the view of the valley. We were just getting to the interesting looking area where to road is finally in the hills ... when we encountered a private property sign. There's a depressing preponderance of these for a state where 90% of the land is under federal ownership. Carrara Canyon is not far at all from Yucca Mountain, the controversial nuclear waste disposal site - it's just over the hills. Very much federally owned. Very much no trespassing: enforced, as I understand it, by serious people bristling with armaments.


The cloud was thickening and the signage forbid us to go further - we started back, picking up more rocks as we went (no point picking them up on the way up the hill.) It wasn't until walking back down that my knees told me how much of a slope it really was. We were cooled by enough drops of rain to be pleasant, not enough to get wet or wake up the washes. Even I couldn't worry about flash floods when the clouds were still so high in the sky. The following two days were stormy - our year's supply of rain, it felt like - thunder and lightning for hours on end. So we were lucky yet again, to have this silver-lined stripy afternoon.

Itinerary

160 to Pahrump, 160 to 95, 95 to Carrara, 95 home.